Letter from Palestine

The Most Dangerous Job in Gaza

Surprisingly soft-spoken and conciliatory, newly elected Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas is at the center of a widening war with Israel. In Gaza and Tel Aviv, the author assesses Haniyeh's character—and chances of survival.

When Palestinian militants from Hamas and two other groups killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped a third, Corporal Gilad Shalit, in late June, it seemed like a minor skirmish, at least in the context of Middle Eastern carnage. But, in a land of such deep hatreds and hair-trigger sensitivities, the strike quickly prompted an enormous Israeli assault on beleaguered Gaza, ostensibly to free the abducted soldier and stop Palestinian rocket fire, but really to cripple, if not topple, the Hamas regime altogether.

Two weeks later, the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah staged a similar cross-border attack, proving that, in radical Islamic circles, hatred for Israel transcended even the bitter Shiite-Sunni divide. It, too, prompted a colossal Israeli counterattack, one that devastated Lebanon and threatened an even wider war involving the two principal backers of the radical Islamic groups: Iran and Syria.

Hezbollah, a Lebanese-based, Shiite Muslim organization, and Hamas, the Sunni Muslim group which pioneered suicide bombings in Israel before entering, and dominating, Palestinian electoral politics, are first cousins, bound by the same sources of support and the same enmities. They both are attempting to govern and wage guerrilla war simultaneously. But did the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, approve of Hezbollah's fraternal operation in Lebanon? It was hard to say. Fearing an Israeli attempt on his life, he had gone into hiding and was silent for many days before, predictably, he assailed the Israeli operation.

But when the fighting in Lebanon subsides, all eyes will return to the state of the Palestinians, both in the geographical and metaphysical sense: that is, to the inevitable but seemingly unreachable Palestinian state-to-be; and to the Palestinian state of affairs, including the fate of Haniyeh, one of those rare democratically elected Arab prime ministers.

Given Hamas's enormous appeal, no peace is possible without it—the failed Oslo peace accords proved that. Whatever the outcome, then, when the rubble from Gaza's latest trauma is pushed to one side—in Gaza, rubble is only moved, never cleared away—and the dust from all the rubble in Lebanon has settled, Hamas will remain. The questions at the core of whatever happens in the Middle East are what—or who—Hamas will be, whether Haniyeh will still be a part of it, and, if so, what role he will want, or be allowed, to play.

In some ways, Haniyeh appeared marginalized by these latest crises, supplanted by Khaled Meshal, Hamas's leader in exile in Damascus, who reportedly had planned the first fateful attack—in part, it was said, to undermine his increasingly popular and more moderate rival. But while the more radical Meshal controlled Hamas's money, much of it from Iran, and had the backing of the mysterious shura, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood that runs Hamas, Haniyeh possessed something perhaps as powerful: the Palestinian people. So his prospects are unclear. He could prove a historic figure or a footnote. Or, like so many Hamas figures before him, he could become just another shahid—a martyr.

Early in July, an Israeli helicopter bombed Haniyeh's office. Haniyeh wasn't on the premises, as the Israelis, relying on informants who honeycomb Gaza, surely knew. They'd only wanted to send him a message: that they knew where he was, and could hit him whenever they wanted. The message had a second component, too: the Israelis weren't buying Haniyeh's insistence that Hamas has several heads, and that as its political leader in the territories he had no control over military matters. To Israel, Hamas is a single, unified, and evil entity, and needs to be expunged. And so, too, if things get bad enough, must be its leaders.

Within 15 minutes of the blast, Haniyeh emerged from wherever he was hiding to survey the damage—for all their precision, the Israelis had actually missed his office, with its giant portraits of Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque and the Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas—and to convey a message of his own. The Israelis had "targeted a symbol of the Palestinian people," he declared amid the debris, the smashed toilets and crumbled walls. What the Israelis had done was arrogant and primitive, "the policy of the jungle." And it wouldn't work. "Nothing," he said, "will affect our spirit and nothing will affect our steadfastness."

Under assault by the Israeli military, Gaza was now suffering slow strangulation, its bridges, water, and electricity knocked out, its people shaken by bomb blasts and ear-shattering sonic booms, its leaders in the West Bank rounded up and thrown into Israeli jails. While needing to watch his own back, Haniyeh also had to reassure his people, which was why he'd come to his office, cameramen in tow, just as he had spoken at a mosque the day before, during Friday prayers. His task now was simple. He just had to be invisible and visible at once.

The New Hamas

Haniyeh, 43, a barrel-chested former soccer player with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, spoke at the mosque that Friday, packed as it always was for one of his appearances, for more than an hour, counseling patience and pride, steadfastness and defiance, solidarity and prayer. "While you are hearing the raids in the sky, just mention Allah, and he will be there for you," he advised, in a tone that was indignant but also, somehow, calm. Then, as the adoring throng lunged toward him, he made his way to the prime minister's limousine—a used Mercedes he chose, in part, to contrast himself with his corrupt, self-indulgent predecessors from Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. "May Allah protect you, Abu Abed!" a man shouted at him, using the nickname by which Gazans know and address him. "Who knows?" the man remarked as Haniyeh prepared to leave. "This may be the last time we see him."

Only a few weeks earlier I had been in the building the Israelis bombed, and for anyone whose image of Hamas is men holding up AK-47s and wearing black masks and green headbands displaying Koranic verses, it was a bit disorienting. One doesn't expect Hamas people to speak American English and have an AOL e-mail address, as did one key Haniyeh aide I met, or to have a cell phone that rings to the tune of a Bach minuet, as did another, or to have congratulated me over the killing that day of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's man in Iraq, as had a third. "For us too, it's good," he told me. When I asked why, he seemed taken aback. "He's a terrorist," he explained.

Nor is it easy to write about a robust, vital, and charismatic man who could be obliterated by the time you read these words. But that is the state, or fate, of Ismail Haniyeh. Less than a week earlier, Abbas, the Palestinian president who is also known as Abu Mazen, had warned him that unless the kidnapped Israeli soldier, abducted by members of Hamas's military wing along with two other groups, was freed the Israelis would assassinate him. The same day Haniyeh's life seemed suddenly in jeopardy, the Pope telephoned him, apparently asking him to help end the impasse. At the same time came suggestions that Haniyeh was too inconsequential to beseech. Since the first kidnapping, Khaled Meshal has become increasingly visible and vocal, even giving a press conference in Damascus, effectively asserting his primacy over the organization. But Hamas prides itself on its discipline, and Haniyeh plays the good soldier; though Meshal's role may have placed Haniyeh's life at greater risk, Haniyeh insists that all talk of rivalries within Hamas is Israeli-inspired wishful thinking.

Since leading the group to elective office in Gaza and the West Bank, Haniyeh has been the face of the new, user-friendly Hamas. It wears suits and ties rather than robes, sits politely in parliament instead of shooting machine guns into the air, talks of coexisting with Israel rather than driving it into the sea. Members of this incarnation of Hamas still carry their Korans but soft-pedal their own charter, which states that, as long as the sky and earth exist, all Palestine is a gift from Allah, not a single inch of which a Muslim may ever yield. All negotiations, it goes on, are "an empty waste of time"; "the only solution is jihad."

But it's hard for a basket case to wage holy war. Nearly half the Palestinian Authority's $2 billion annual budget comes from foreign donations. And by refusing to renounce violence, recognize Israel, and honor past agreements, Hamas has forsaken those funds. The result has been mass privation, against which Haniyeh has had little to offer except Churchillian rhetoric—declaring, during an earlier Friday sermon, that his people would subsist on "salt and olives" rather than surrender their rights. (A cartoon in a newspaper run by Fatah, the group Arafat once led, and Hamas's secular political rivals, showed a Palestinian withdrawing salt and olives from an ATM.) His most concrete attempt to lift the siege came in a tentative agreement to form a national-unity government with Fatah, an idea initiated by a group of prominent prisoners, representing all key Palestinian factions, in Israeli jails. That agreement would have led Hamas to grant begrudging quasi-recognition to Israel, something it had never previously done. The Israelis called it a "nonstarter," and it was all shelved anyway once the Israeli assault on Gaza began. And it came to seem even more irrelevant as the conflict widened to Lebanon, in a spiral of violence that has silenced more moderate elements and empowered the radicals and rejectionists.

Haniyeh is a man caught in the middle, but someone caught in the middle is, inevitably, central. Numerous Israeli officials—including Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Interior Minister Avi Dichter—make it clear that he is in their crosshairs: officially, because he is the top man in the Palestinian territories. Unofficially, because what makes him, to Palestinians, the most charismatic and appealing figure in Hamas makes him, at least to some Israelis, the most dangerous. "Being an enemy doesn't mean he is not impressive, in his appearance, the way he expresses himself and what he believes in," said one senior Israeli military official. "From the leadership point of view, he was best choice." But while the look had changed, he went on, the outlook hadn't: Haniyeh remained the disciple, the clone, of Hamas's hard-line founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. "One can say that he's trying to be pragmatic, but he's suffering from … " and here he paused, rummaging through his English. "Pitzul ishiyout," he continued, using the Hebrew phrase for schizophrenia. "On one hand he's trying to be a leader, and on other hand he's still a Hamas extremist. I consider all of them terrorists."

Haniyeh is, in some ways, an actuarial and political fluke. Israel's policy of assassinating Hamas leaders—it has killed many of them, including, during a five-week span in 2004, both Sheikh Yassin and his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi—gave Hamas's next generation the kind of upward mobility few organizations have ever offered. Those now running the show were lucky or imprisoned or in exile. At the same time, Haniyeh's rise seems inevitable, given both his own compelling personality and his link to the sainted Sheikh Yassin.

The father of 13, Haniyeh is soft-spoken, conciliatory, and empathetic. He is, naturally, devout, his days punctuated with prayer, his hands often fingering the beads of his masbahah. To all appearances he is scrupulously honest and ascetic, important traits after Fatah's kleptocracy. He is handsome, looks avuncular, and sounds moderate, which helped him leapfrog, at least publicly, over more senior Hamas officials, such as Mahmoud al-Zahar, the fiery foreign minister, and win for Hamas thousands of swing voters who hardly share its extreme religious or political beliefs. He is also a bit provincial: he's barely left Gaza, unless you count the time in 1992 when the Israelis dumped him and 400 other militants, mostly from Hamas, on a Lebanese hillside—a time when the ties between Hamas and Hezbollah were first cemented.

The key question with Haniyeh is whether, given the party's fundamentalist theological roots, he really is or ever even could be moderate, or if, despite minor stylistic and rhetorical differences, he is every bit as committed to the same vision of Islamic hegemony, over not just Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank but the entire Arab world. It is a vision first laid out by Hassan al-Banna, founder of Hamas's parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt, nearly 80 years ago. Skeptics say Haniyeh and Meshal may play good and bad cop, respectively, but they belong to the same police force, with the same rigid code. But because he appears so pragmatic, Haniyeh highlights more than anyone the contradiction at the heart of Hamas, which since its election has tried to remain a resistance movement while becoming a government, something Arafat also tried to do.

Haniyeh's vocabulary is restrained, generally free of the usual chilling terms—e.g., "Zionist entity" for Israel—in Hamas's lexicon. Sometimes, as in a piece in July in The Washington Post, he talks of a "permanent" peace with Israel. But in the same article he actually offered, as he had often before, something less: a long-term truce, or hudna, with Israel, in exchange for a Palestinian state in the lands Israel occupied in 1967: the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. At first blush it sounds reasonable. But it's nothing new; conceding that Israel's inevitable destruction was at least a few decades away, Sheikh Yassin offered the same thing 10 years ago. Nor is there anything in it about Israel's right to the lands it won in 1948. In any case, few Israelis are tempted. For one thing, 250,000 of them now live on land that was Palestinian until 1967. For another, Haniyeh insists on the rights of Palestinians and their descendants to return to the places they left nearly 60 years ago, a move that would overwhelm Israel's Jewish majority. Then there's the suspicion that the Palestinians would use the pause simply to re-arm. To the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, someone touted as a future prime minister, the truce would merely allow Hamas to instill anti-Israel hatred in additional generations of Palestinian children. "As far as Israel is concerned, it's the same movement, the same terrorist organization," she tells me. Or, as the former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir once put it, "The Arabs are the same Arabs, the Jews are the same Jews, and the sea is the same sea."

Hamas's poll numbers have gone down a bit since the election, but Haniyeh himself remains popular, both among politicians and on the Palestinian street. "He's a good person, a good man," Khaled al-Batsh, an Islamic Jihad leader, told me one day in Gaza City, at a rally, one of the almost daily displays of Palestinian rage in which gunmen in a dizzying array of uniforms refrained from shooting at one another only because, at least for the moment, their ire was directed at Israel. Surveys show that Haniyeh is the most trusted of all Palestinian leaders by a wide margin, especially in Gaza. "He's very, very wise because he can take lots on his shoulders," said Umm Nidal, who is perhaps the most famous of the new Palestinian legislators; three of her sons have already been killed in operations against the Israelis, and she's ready to supply more. "No one is helping him out," said Nayef Ealow, who runs Gaza's most famous falafel stand, whose cheap food these days suddenly seems dear. "If he had a way to help people, he would."

"When I see him, I laugh, because he became a superstar so quickly and reached a position he himself never dreamed of," said Mustafa Sawaf, who knew Haniyeh at the Islamic University of Gaza. "The leadership potential was obvious, but the growth was so fast … without fertilizer! Hamas grew very fast, and he grew with it."

Haniyeh knows he is a marked man and does not seem unduly bothered by it: everything rests with Allah anyway. But to one of Haniyeh's old teachers, Khamis Madie, it would be a shame if, for whatever reason, Haniyeh didn't last. "Great things are only done by great men, and peace is a great thing that needs a man like Abu Abed to pull it off," he said in the mourning tent where he was honoring his late uncle as his family passed around dates and coffee. "If Israel doesn't make peace with someone like him, it will lose a historic chance," he went on. "He has control over the masses." With lions like Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin now gone, Madie despairs of finding an Israeli leader so bold; indeed, with the new Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, an electoral accident with a shaky coalition and no real military background, he's probably right.

Between Two Worlds

Great things are evidently planned at the Erez crossing, which separates Israel from Gaza. A giant building with a curved roof, something Eero Saarinen could have designed, is under construction, equipped to handle streams of trucks and visitors between the two places. But with Israeli-Palestinian relations frozen, there's only a trickle of traffic. Even before the Israelis officially closed off the crossing following the first kidnapping, the seal around the Gaza Strip, one of the world's poorest and most densely populated places, could not have been much more hermetic.

The handful of Palestinians entering Israel encounter a daunting gamut of corridors, gates, and gizmos. After negotiating their way through narrow turnstiles—it's not easy while carrying luggage and young children—they enter a gigantic glass bubble, stick up their arms as if in surrender, and are scanned from head to toe for bombs. No soldiers can be seen; suicide bombers have hit Erez, and the Israelis don't like being blown up. They monitor everything by camera and bark out their orders over loudspeakers.

Going in the other direction, toward Gaza, is an entirely different experience. Most borders you simply cross, horizontally. But entering this place, you have the unmistakable sensation of descending, of sinking into something. Your last few steps on Israeli soil are down a giant corridor flanked by enormous, curving concrete walls. Since there are so few footfalls, one hears only birds—and, even before the Israeli assault, the shells aimed at Palestinian rocket launchers: muffled when they are fired, louder and more violent when, three seconds or so later, they land. There are no signs welcoming you to Palestine, which one realizes one has entered when the walls grow lower and shabbier, the roof switches from blue nylon to corrugated iron, and occasional Arabic admonitions appear: "A Clean Country Is a Great Country." "Mention Allah." At this end, no one checks your bags for explosives, or anything else. The customs officers—a man for men, a woman for women—sit idly in their adjacent spartan cubicles, indifferently processing the occasional traveler. A picture of Arafat smiles down on the women. Someone in a semi-uniform hands out leaflets for a hotel in Gaza City, but apart from the reporters and relief workers, these days there's not much call for rooms.

Walk outside and there is heat, dust, and an undercurrent of menace and unease. The sinking sensation only intensifies along Salah E-Din Street, the desolate, pockmarked boulevard leading into Gaza City. From its streetlights hang small, forlorn flags left over from the January election, yellow for Fatah, green for Hamas. On either side are gray cement buildings which, like so much of Gaza, remain unfinished. Donkey- and horse-drawn carts share the trash-strewn streets with battered cars and trucks. The few trees around are grimy, stunted survivors of a happier and less crowded era. Occasionally, there are signs of Gaza's lost elegance. It is like Havana: someday, change will wash away the lost decades. But in another way it's actually Belfast that Gaza resembles most. In each, the faces of martyrs stare out at you everywhere—on the sides of houses in Northern Ireland, here on roadside signs: two-dimensional portraits of young men, some looking defiant, some innocent, inevitably brandishing their weapons. But in the past few years, particularly since Hamas, riding a wave of popular support and eager to get into politics, declared a truce and the Israelis left, few new ones have gone up; existing ones have faded in the scorching sun.

Like other Palestinian refugee camps, the Shati camp, or the "Beach Camp," is a bit of a misnomer. One imagines a tent city, but this place has been around so long—since the nakba, or "catastrophe," of 1948, when thousands of Palestinians fled their homes in what had just become Israel—that it looks as neighborhood-like as any others. Only the narrow alleys and the asbestos roofs over some of the older, smaller buildings betray its origins. Haniyeh's house, much nicer than those around it, is a four-story structure, white with green trim—a displaced bit of Miami Beach Deco. It's said that from his roof one can see al-Joura, the village, near the southern Israeli town of Ashkelon, from which his family and many other residents of the Shati camp, Sheikh Yassin among them, fled; it's close enough to be within range of Palestinian rockets.

A blue police barrier blocks off either end of Haniyeh's block, which terminates, to the west, at what one Israeli paper calls the cheapest piece of real estate on the Mediterranean, the ragged, polluted Gaza shoreline. The bodyguard there looks intimidating but is actually quite nonchalant. "Danger only comes from enemies, and he has no enemies here," he said. By Haniyeh's house are more bodyguards, with submachine guns. Thinking it's insufficiently elegant for a prime minister and too accessible to Israeli frogmen, friends have urged Haniyeh to move, but he has refused. "Anywhere else he would feel like a stranger," one neighbor said. He's also declined to kick out the street vendors, like the man cooking ears of corn near his front door. When I visited in early June, there'd been no water on the block for four days. But no one blames Abu Abed. (Fathers derive such nicknames from the names of their eldest sons; Abed is the oldest of Haniyeh's children. Abu means father.) After all, he's suffering, too.

After a few moments a blue-green Mercedes pulls up, and two of the bodyguards begin wiping its windows. It is Haniyeh's limousine, the pre-owned middle vehicle in his makeshift, three-car motorcade. A few moments later he comes down the stairs, steps outside, and waves cheerfully to his neighbors. Everywhere, it seems, are his children. Haniyeh married his cousin, and many of his offspring have the same distinctive green eyes. His son Wesam, 22, a bit cocky and with a neatly trimmed beard, is one of his bodyguards. Another son, 20-year-old Moaz—who told Shlomi Eldar of Israel's Channel 10 a decade ago that he wanted to grow up to be a suicide bomber, only to be upbraided by his father—is on the sidewalk. Another boy, with a tan shirt, probably about 12, ambles up. That's Hazem. Nearby is a little boy with a black striped shirt—his name is Amir. The little girl in the blue dress eating sunflower seeds is 15-month-old Sara. She is about the most visible female in Haniyeh's family; his wife is rarely seen or photographed. In late May, Haniyeh's 17-year-old daughter, Khoula, made a brief media appearance when she was detained for using false papers to visit her fiancé in an Israeli jail. The Israelis quickly let her go. Maybe it would score them Brownie points with her old man, someone surmised.

Moaz invited us to sit in the small concrete courtyard across from the house, and within a few minutes Hazem had arrived with an armful of 7 Ups. Soon, a crying, middle-aged woman entered, part of the never-ending parade of supplicants these days to Haniyeh's house. With the Israeli siege, she sobbed, her children were hungry. Moaz reached into his pocket and gave her 100 shekels, approximately $22. The Israelis may have left, but Israeli money, honoring Zionist heroes, is still legal tender here. She blessed his family and left. I wanted to ask Moaz about his father, but instead he and a cousin began grilling me. Why was America choking a democratically elected government? Was it fair to call someone attempting only to reclaim his land and the land of his grandfather a terrorist? How was it that Hamas, which hadn't fired a bullet in a year and a half, had gotten nothing in return?

Haniyeh was born in the Shati camp in 1962. His family was religious, and he grew up on the Koran and soccer, excelling at both. He attended a United Nations school for refugee children, and his family, like much of Gaza, got by on U.N. handouts. He married at 17, partly so that his father, who was ill, could witness it before he died. He then attended the Islamic University, a hotbed of religious fervor, from which he graduated in 1987 with a degree in Arabic literature. There he had joined the Islamic Student Bloc, a Hamas precursor, and eventually became its leader. When the first intifada started, in 1987, religious faith and Palestinian nationalism fused. Sheikh Yassin founded Hamas, and Haniyeh signed up.

Haniyeh did time in Israeli jails—a prerequisite on the résumé of any Palestinian leader—though never hard time for violent acts. In late 1987 it was 18 days, for participating in riots. A few weeks later he got another six months. In mid-1989 he began serving three years for activity in an illegal organization, incitement, and distributing leaflets. Eyad Ali, a Hamas activist imprisoned with the future prime minister, described how Haniyeh regularly sang Islamic songs for his fellow prisoners, how his Ping-Pong games with a Fatah man became epic, good-humored political battles, and how, even in prison, he managed to bring various factions together. Unlike many imprisoned Palestinians, he refused to learn Hebrew.

Shortly after his release, Haniyeh was among those deported to Lebanon. He then returned to Gaza, where he eventually became dean of the Islamic University. In 1996 he urged that Hamas participate in the first Palestinian elections, but was overruled. The following year, as part of a deal with Jordan to release Mossad agents who'd tried to kill Khaled Meshal, the Israelis released Yassin, and Haniyeh was named to head his office. For the next six years, Yassin, crippled since he was a boy and confined to a wheelchair, was rarely seen without Haniyeh at his side. Haniyeh became his arms, his legs, his disciple, his emissary, his surrogate son.

Characteristically, Haniyeh was by Yassin's side on September 6, 2003, when, according to the Israelis, the sheikh met with the top leaders of Hamas's military wing. The Israelis learned of the meeting, and an F-16 bombed the building. But, stung by criticism over a prior operation in which 14 civilians had been killed along with a key Hamas militant, the Israelis had opted this time for smaller ordnance, and everyone escaped. "So the difference between Haniyeh as prime minister and Haniyeh as a body was a few inches," one senior Israeli military official told me. "Haniyeh was very close to be … in heaven. Or in hell—I don't know where. I believe in heaven, where the 72 virgins are waiting for him." (Haniyeh has insisted he and Yassin were on a social visit that day.)

The Israelis soon enough caught up with Yassin, killing him in March 2004; Haniyeh was spared only because the hit took place at dawn, when the two were apart. At Yassin's funeral, Haniyeh wept for the full 25 minutes of his eulogy. Four weeks later, after Yassin's successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was also assassinated, Haniyeh went into hiding, where he remained for the next 11 months. So popular was he that people vied for the privilege of sheltering him. When Taghreed El-Khodary, a Palestinian journalist, caught up with him in a mosque in the Beach Camp, she was struck by his calm—he sat on a mattress and wore a djellaba, the kind of robe Arab men wear at home—as well as the calm of those listening to him, even though they, too, were placing themselves in harm's way simply by sitting at his side.

In late 2005, Hamas opted to participate in the Palestinian legislative elections, set for January 25, 2006, and Haniyeh headed their list. Its campaign minimized talk about destroying Israel, focused on Fatah corruption, and used the slogan "Yes for change and reform." Everyone—Hamas included—was shocked when it won 74 of 132 seats. Tzipi Livni seemed puzzled by Hamas's appeal. What kind of program, she asked me, did Hamas offer the Palestinians? In fact, even left-wing, secular Palestinians voted for Hamas, not because they, too, support suicide bombings or want to restore the Islamic caliphate or install Muslim Shari'a law, but because, after years of Fatah's corruption and clumsiness, and with no Arab left left, Hamas offered a chance to protest, a fresh start, dignity, honesty, hope. It is something Israel might consider while attempting to obliterate it.

The Palestinians now had a schizophrenic government: a Fatah president, Mahmoud Abbas, and a Hamas prime minister. Though he appears to respect Haniyeh personally, Abbas refused to take part in a unity Cabinet and warned that if Hamas remained intransigent he would call for new elections. Undeterred, Haniyeh stocked the Cabinet with Hamas people. His message to Israel was about as conciliatory as any Hamas leader could utter. "We do not wish for a bloodbath in the region," he said. "Hamas's holding power is the beginning of a solution to the conflict, if the Israelis wish it." The night before he was sworn in, Haniyeh, ever mindful of symbolism, stayed home with friends and ate a dish made with an herb that grows wild in Gaza.

In a series of interviews, Haniyeh set out to soften Hamas's battered image. He spoke of restoring calm and stability, insisted he'd played no part in any of Hamas's military operations, and, in a remark said to have offended some colleagues, suggested to David Hawkins of CBS that he would discourage his children from becoming suicide bombers. His top priorities, he said, were domestic: improving living conditions and security, respecting human rights, even empowering women. But he said Hamas would recognize only those past agreements with Israel that were "in the interests of the Palestinian people." In an ostensibly lighter moment, he asked a reporter for Der Spiegel how he could get the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to invite him to the World Cup. "Recognize Israel's right to exist and renounce violence," he was told. "Then I'd rather watch the World Cup on television," he replied.

To Al Jazeera, Haniyeh said the United States government was under the thumb of the American right, Christian Zionists, and neoconservatives, all hostile to Islam and controlled by Israel. But he has insisted he has nothing against Jews as Jews, just as occupiers, and would welcome them into a future Palestinian state. Nonetheless, when CNN asked him about Hamas's charter—which endorses the infamous anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; compares Jews repeatedly to Nazis; accuses them of fomenting the French and Russian Revolutions and both World Wars; posits Jewish hegemony over the media, movies, schools, and even Rotary Clubs; depicts Jews as drug and alcohol pushers; and envisions a Muslim massacre of every last one of them—he changed the subject.

Israeli politics are fractious, but on the question of whether to speak with Hamas, there is near-universal agreement across the spectrum: no way. Haniyeh does talk regularly to a few Israeli journalists. Shlomi Eldar speaks fondly of him, and Danny Rubinstein, who covers Arab affairs for the newspaper Haaretz, says Haniyeh practically hugged him when they first met. Haniyeh is also cordial with Roni Shaked, who writes about the Palestinians for Israel's largest paper, Yedioth Ahronoth. "He's very pretty, very nice, but very dangerous," says Shaked. "It's like at a barbecue: 'We're going to put a little honey on your body—it will be O.K.'" But apart from them, and a few veterans of the army or the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, who'd met Haniyeh when Israel still occupied Gaza, it's hard to find any Israelis who actually know him. (The same goes for some Palestinians who live on the West Bank; Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator with the Israelis, said he barely knew Haniyeh.) Surely few contiguous spots on Earth have leaders who are such complete strangers to one another.

A few Israelis, such as the former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, have urged greater flexibility with Hamas, at least if it honors prior agreements and prevents future terrorist attacks. A hudna is the best Israel can hope for now, he says, and needn't be the "honey trap" everyone claims; the Israelis, too, could use the time productively. Danny Rubinstein says that by killing Hamas's leaders and bombing its constituents Israel makes sure that Hamas stays too radical to talk to. But this remains a minority view. Far more typical is Yigal Carmon, a former Israeli colonel who now runs the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, which reviews Arabic-language articles, broadcasts, and Web sites. To him, the group is terminally inflexible, hopelessly bound by ideology, 1,400 years of Islamic history and theology, and the dictates of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the void left by Prime Minister Olmert and Defense Minister Peretz, both of whom have, by Israeli standards, little military background, it is Dan Halutz, the military's chief of staff, a flamboyant, self-confident longtime air-force pilot, who may be driving Israeli policy toward Hamas, at least since the Shalit kidnapping. Halutz is said to have political ambitions; among the pictures of his predecessors hanging outside his high-rise office in Tel Aviv are two—Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak—who have already walked that walk. Halutz would not comment on Haniyeh specifically or whether the Israelis would let him die a natural death. "Being a terrorist, holding a terrorism ideology, and acting accordingly is not promising a long life" was all he would say. "No one can hide behind a suit. A suit means nothing."

As we were about to leave his office, Halutz walked to the window and looked outside. Elsewhere, such a spectacular, panoramic view would belong to a corporate executive. Sheikh Yassin was confident, as Ismail Haniyeh presumably still is, that the Palestinians, having already outlasted the Crusaders and other interloping infidels, can outlast the Jews too on the embattled property below us, and maybe they're right. But if ever one wanted to feel the grip the Zionists now have over this land, there it was. Less than a hundred years ago the man who was to become Tel Aviv's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, posed with his fellow pioneers for a famous photograph on what was then a deserted beach; now it was an enormous, gleaming, throbbing metropolis. Halutz pointed to the landmarks: the house of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion; the opera; one of the museums. "It's so nice," he said, drinking it all in. "Why someone should try to destroy it?"

Back to the Future

One sleepy Friday morning in mid-June, as someone scrubbed the sidewalk outside the Al Wafa Taxi Service, near the beach in Gaza City, I interviewed Eyad Ali, the Hamas activist who spent time with Haniyeh in prison. Ali, 39, the director of administration at the Islamic University, was not my idea of a Hamas man: he was shy and soft-spoken, fingering his car keys nervously as he talked. A battered Mitsubishi drove by. That looked like Abu Abed's old car, he noted. "We are all ideological people, but the most flexible among us is Abu Abed," he told me; killing him would be a "huge mistake."

Later that morning, Haniyeh spoke in another jam-packed mosque, this one in the Sheikh Radwan section of Gaza City, not far from where Rantisi had lived and died. Outside, all around, were hundreds of young boys; seeing them, one realized why the Israelis had been so eager to leave Gaza and, now, most of the West Bank: demographics. Were they to hold on to this land, the Palestinians would simply overwhelm them. That morning, Haniyeh extolled the latest shahid, the head of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees, Jamal Abu Samhadana, who had recently been appointed chief of a new Palestinian security service, and whom the Israelis had killed the night before. The Palestinians, he pledged, would stay faithful to those who had "irrigated the land with their holy blood." Then he led prayers. It is not easy, I could see, to bow toward Mecca while wearing a machine gun. When Haniyeh left the mosque, people waved and whistled. "If he stays alive, he's going to become a legend," my companion said. "If he stays alive."

The afternoon was quiet until Nabil, the little boy who sold candy bars in front of my hotel, approached, very agitated. "Eshreen," he kept saying. When I looked at him uncomprehendingly, he bent over and drew a "20" on the sidewalk. Some people had just been hit on the beach, and he was trying to tell me how many. Seconds later, three cars sped by, the blue-green Mercedes in the middle. "Haniyeh," Nabil said. My translator and I promptly drove to Kamal Odwan hospital, where frenzied crowds swarmed in front, making it almost impossible for the ambulances to enter. Nearby, some people looked skyward, pointing. There, just northwest of one of Gaza's ubiquitous kites, was a white speck, looking like a mosquito in a floodlight. It was an Israeli drone. We then went to the beach. The carnage had been removed; all that remained were some mangled shoes, a broken bowl, and the remnants of an aborted picnic lunch, including a few ears of corn. There was also discolored sand. Some, in a shallow crater, had apparently been bleached white by the explosive; a few yards away, there was a splotch of red.

Afew hours later, Haniyeh, in a sports jacket and blue shirt with an open collar, made the rounds of the hospitals, visiting the victims. From one room to another, one bed to another, he went, greeting the adults, cradling and kissing the heads of the children. "Does it hurt?" he asked a boy who had lost three fingers. "Tomorrow you will be up and running again and playing football." The boy's father, a small, wizened man looking for a bit of comfort, stopped the prime minister at the door. "What has been taken from him, it has preceded him to heaven," Haniyeh told him.

In another room, Haniyeh saw a boy whose facial burns were covered with Vaseline. Then there was another child, sprawled out and inert on the bed, then, in the corner, a girl with dark curly hair. She sat up and did not appear injured, only in shock. It was Huda Ghalia, 12, whose despair over losing her family had been captured on film that was already being broadcast all over the world. "Don't worry, you will go home soon," Haniyeh told her. Afterward, on the stairway, he stopped, leaned over the banister, and shouted at my translator. "Tell him this girl lost her father and mother and three of her brothers!" he said. "This is a war crime!" "Him" was me, the American at his side. The next day, Haniyeh said he would adopt the girl. (The Israelis subsequently said the bomb may not have been theirs, but a Palestinian land mine.) His rounds over, Haniyeh spread out a green-and-red musalla, or prayer mat, and with a dozen men behind him began to lead the maghreb, or evening prayer. In a gentle tenor, he recited two verses from the Koran. "Verily man is in loss, except such as have faith, and do righteous deeds, and join together in the mutual teaching of truth," one of them went.

A few weeks later, after the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, Haniyeh insisted he knew nothing about the operation, but did not condemn it and did nothing to secure Shalit's release, insisting only that Shalit not be harmed and be treated with respect. The fate of a possible Palestinian national-unity government, arising out of an agreement negotiated by two other potential future Palestinian leaders, both held at Israel's Hadarim Prison—Marwan Barghouti, of Fatah, and Sheikh Abdel Khaleq al-Natsheh, of Hamas—then worked over by Haniyeh and Abbas, was suddenly up in the air. So, too, was Haniyeh's.

Shalom Harari, a retired brigadier general and perhaps Israel's leading expert on Palestinian affairs, says Haniyeh would not be the first item on any Israeli hit list: Meshal, along with the leaders of Hamas's military wing, would be. One Israeli list had Haniyeh ranked only fourth. But any immunity, Harari explains, would have its limits: "If Hamas will do something like two or three very, very bloody operations inside Tel Aviv, suicide bombings, and Israel doesn't have the ability to kill Meshal or those who have done it, it might out of rage shoot Haniyeh," he said. He then offered an Arab proverb: "If you cannot control the donkey, you beat the saddle." As the diplomatic efforts have stalled and the Israeli incursion has lengthened and widened, as the rhetoric has grown more heated and extreme, that possibility could not be discounted. But even before that, as I left Gaza, past the last few sun-drained posters of shahids, I was wondering whether some new ones would soon take their place, and how familiar their faces would be.

We went back along Salah E-Din and soon arrived at Erez. As usual, it was completely empty. A Palestinian soldier checked our passports, laboriously recording the numbers by hand. Then, as we prepared ourselves for the Israelis, something startling happened: another Palestinian soldier asked to check our bags. As he halfheartedly fingered through my dirty clothes, I wondered what he could possibly be looking for. Not guns or explosives, surely, for how could he object if they ended up in Israel? And not for anything valuable, for what does Gaza have these days that anyone would ever want to remove? Only as we walked down that long, sad tunnel toward Israel, taking the left-hand turn that marked the frontier, did I figure it out. The man wasn't looking for anything in my bags. He was looking for his country.

David Margolick is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His latest book is Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink (Knopf).